"Cyclopean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... In the evening, when the day was darkening into night, Duchie and I,—the S. Q. N. remaining to read and rest,—walked up Glen Ogle. It was then in its primeval state, the new road non-existent, and the old one staggering up and down and across that most original and Cyclopean valley, deep, threatening, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... and returned. As again we pass the cathedral cliff on the north, and join the western side with this in one view, we are somewhat prepared by familiarity to mingle its majesty and beauty, and take from them a single impression. The long Cyclopean wall and vast Gothic roof of the side, including many an arched, rounded, and waving line, emphasized by straight lines of blue seam, are set off against the strange shining traceries of the facade; while the union of flower-like softness and eternal strength, the fretted silver of surface, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... constructed water basins on different levels, surrounding them with raised walls artistically sculptured; between the basins he pitched marble pavilions, looking in the distance like airy domes on a Cyclopean temple; then he drew the work together by a tesselated pavement identical with the floor of the house of Caesar hard by the Forum ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... associations is handled, so that each reviews in some measure the whole history of Irish civilisation as it concerned one particular place. But in a fuller sense the chapters are arranged so as to suggest a continuous idea of Irish life, from the prehistoric period illustrated by cyclopean monuments, down to the full development of purely Irish civilisation which is typified by the buildings at Cashel. Seats of ancient sovereignty like Tara, or of ancient art and learning like Clonmacnoise, are described so as to show what the ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... as pitch hung in front of them. Suddenly, from its heart, there gushed a blinding flash of lightning, followed, almost without interval, by a crash of thunder. The echoes took up the sounds, hurling them back and forward among the cliffs as if cyclopean mountain spirits were playing tennis with boulders. Rain also descended in torrents, and for some time the whole scene became as dark as if overspread with the ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... they went to the point, where the cyclopean wall of granite cliff which forms the western side of Lundy, ends sheer in a precipice of some three hundred feet, topped by a pile of snow-white rock, bespangled with golden lichens. As they approached, a raven, who sat upon the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Thence to the north, by Asia's western bound, Fair Lemnos stands, with rising marble crown'd; Where, in her rage, avenging Juno hurl'd 290 Ill-fated Vulcan from the ethereal world. There his eternal anvils first he rear'd; Then, forged by Cyclopean art, appear'd Thunders that shook the skies with dire alarms, And form'd, by skill divine, immortal arms; There, with this crippled wretch, the foul disgrace And living scandal of the empyreal race, In wedlock lived the beauteous ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... church-drapery, its lace rochets, its fine pierced work, as light as gossamer, running up to the level of the second storey, and forming a fretted frame for the great stone-carvings of the porch. And above that it rose in hermit-like sobriety, unadorned, Cyclopean, with the colossal eye of its dull rose-window between the two towers, one full of windows and richly wrought like the doorway, the other as bare as the facade ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... boats were drawing together rapidly, and soon those on the bridge heard the faint but increasing patter of a gasoline exhaust. Carrying the same speed as The Bedford Castle, the launch shortly came within hailing distance. The cyclopean eye of the ship's searchlight blazed up, and the next instant, out from the gloom leaped a little craft, on the deck of which a man stood waving a lantern. She held steadfastly to her course, and a ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... upon it and saw that it was good, and he blessed all that fertility. He was doing for the campagna what the Cyclopean arciprete had asked the Madonna to do ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... in these compositions striking examples of the beauty that may reveal itself in a crude mass of music. Like the towering Alps, they move one by their very immensity. A German critic says: "In these Cyclopean works the composer lets the elemental and brute forces of sound and pure rhythm have their fling."[101] It is scarcely music, it is the force of Nature herself. Berlioz himself calls his Requiem ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... two or three hours over wide plains and grassy pastures. Soon after leaving Na'oor he took us up a small hill, which was called Setcher, (probably Setker in town pronunciation,) where there were some ruins of no considerable amount, but the stones of cyclopean size. Query—Were these remains of the primeval Zamzummim? (Deut. ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... temple of cyclopean structure at Mundore (Tod's Rajasthan, vol. i. p. 727.), the cross appears as a sacred figure, together with the double triangle, another emblem of very wide distribution, occurring on ancient British coins (Camden's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... country an artificial appearance, which vividly reminded me of those parts of Staffordshire where the great iron-foundries are most numerous. The day was glowing hot, and the scrambling over the rough surface and through the intricate thickets was very fatiguing; but I was well repaid by the strange Cyclopean scene. As I was walking along I met two large tortoises, each of which must have weighed at least two hundred pounds: one was eating a piece of cactus, and as I approached, it stared at me and slowly walked away; the other gave a deep hiss, and drew in its head. These huge ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the sky, the source of which was concealed by the garden foliage, became positively brilliant. The air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk-roses and mown grass; midges fretted in and out of the open windows. But for the lurid lighting of the sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some mammoth forge, you were in the heart of ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... time and rhyme. He was no neater than wide Nature's wild, More metrical than sea winds. Culture's child, Lapped in luxurious laws of line and lilt, Shrank from him shuddering, who was roughly built As cyclopean temples. Yet there rang True music through his rhapsodies, as he sang Of brotherhood, and freedom, love and hope, With strong, wide sympathy which dared to cope With all life's phases, and call nought unclean. Whilst hearts are generous, and whilst woods are green, He shall ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... Trans-Himalayan countries. They took for their guides the principal rivers of Northern India, and were led by them to new homes in their beautiful and fertile valleys. It seems as if the great mountains in the north had afterwards closed for centuries their Cyclopean gates against new immigrations, while, at the same time, the waves of the Indian Ocean kept watch over the southern borders of the peninsula. None of the great conquerors of antiquity,—Sesostris, Semiramis, Nebuchadnezzar, or Cyrus,—disturbed the peaceful ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... and the feeling experienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more broken recesses, seems near akin to that which it is the tendency of some magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the Cyclopean walls of Southern Italy,—the erections of some old gigantic race passed from the earth forever. The feeling must have been experienced on former occasions, amid the innumerable pillars of the Scuir; for we find ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and elements strike you at first as instinctively conforming. This impression was doubtless after a little modified for me; there were levels, there were small stony practicable streets, there were walks and strolls, outside the gates and roundabout the cyclopean wall, to the far end of downward-tending protrusions and promontories, natural buttresses and pleasant terrene headlands, friendly suburban spots (one would call them if the word had less detestable references) where games of bowls and overtrellised wine-tables could ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... penetrate some way towards a consideration of the vascular organism of a true literary style in which there is a vital relation of otherwise lifeless word with word. And wherein lies the progress of architecture from the stupidity of the pyramid and the dead weight of the Cyclopean wall to the spring and the flight of the ogival arch, but in a quasi-organic relation? But the way of such thoughts might be intricate, and the sun rules ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... applied to various structures of massive masonry found in different parts of Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor. The origin of these works was a mystery to the earliest Hellenes, who ascribed them to a race of giants called Cyclops; hence the name Cyclopean that ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... alternate airiness and solidity exhibited by nature in the nicely-poised logging stones and columnar piles, and in the walls of prodigious cuboidal blocks of granite which often crest and top her massive domes and ridges in natural cyclopean masonry." ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... nature, differing But in the work it works; its doubts and clamours Are but the waste and brunt of instruments Wherewith a work is done, or as the hammers On forge Cyclopean plied beneath the rents Of lowest Etna, conquering into shape The hard and scattered ore; Choose thou narcotics, and the dizzy grape Outworking passion, lest with horrid crash Thy life go from thee in a night of pain; So tutoring thy vision, shall the flash Of dove ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... delicate arabesques, the undulating and varied melodies, of Chopin. We should be prepared to appreciate the great Artist in his enthusiastic rendering of the master-pieces of the man he loved; prepared to greet him when he electrifies us with his wonderful Cyclopean harmonies, written for his own Herculean grasp, sparkling with his own Promethean fire, which no meaner hand can ever hope to master! "Hear Liszt and die," has been said by some of his enthusiastic admirers—understand him and ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... green clumps of bushes rooted in crevices. From the plain the stamp sheds and the houses of the mine appeared dark and small, high up, like the nests of birds clustered on the ledges of a cliff. The zigzag paths resembled faint tracings scratched on the wall of a cyclopean blockhouse. To the two serenos of the mine on patrol duty, strolling, carbine in hand, and watchful eyes, in the shade of the trees lining the stream near the bridge, Don Pepe, descending the path from the upper plateau, appeared no bigger ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... head fully five thousand feet above the level floor of Yosemite Valley. In the name itself of this great rock lies an accurate and complete description. Nothing more nor less is it than a cyclopean, rounded dome, split in half as cleanly as an apple that is divided by a knife. It is, perhaps, quite needless to state that but one-half remains, hence its name, the other half having been carried away by the great ice-river in the stormy ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... swept through my mind. A thousand questions arose within me, all of which I desired to ask her, but there, in that noisome prison-house, it was impossible. As I stood there a woman's shrill scream of excruciating pain reached me, notwithstanding those cyclopean walls. Some unfortunate prisoner was, perhaps, being tortured and confession wrung from her lips. I shuddered at the unspeakable horrors of ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... confused with any of (or all) the rest. The Eye of Re was the fire-spitting uraeus-serpent; and foreign people, like the Greeks, Indians and others, gave the Egyptian verbal simile literal expression and converted it into an actual Cyclopean eye planted in the forehead, which shot ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... high and cultivated civilization, not barbaric in any sense, in these remote periods. Indeed, the civilization of the country at that far-off time must have been quite as advanced as in the Nile Valley. Cyclopean walls and other remains show a marvellous skill in construction; individual blocks of granite-stone, measuring as much as fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, being placed in these walls with such skill that even to-day a pen-knife blade cannot be inserted between them. No mortar ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... forefathers. Added to which, as a separate cause of error, there can be little doubt, that intermingled with the human race there has at most periods of the world been a separate and Titanic race, such as the Anakim amongst the peoples of Palestine, the Cyclopean race diffused over the Mediterranean in the elder ages of Greece, and certain tribes amongst the Alps, known to Evelyn in his youth (about Cromwell's time) by an unpleasant travelling experience. These gigantic races, however, were no arguments for ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... trout-pool, The Druid circles, Sheepfolds of Dartmoor, Granite and sandstone, Torridge and Tamar; By Roughtor, by Dozmare, Down the vale of the Fowey Moving in silence. Brushing the nightshade By bridges Cyclopean, By Glynn, Lanhydrock, ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... or more digits, of two whole legs, of two kidneys, and of several teeth becoming symmetrically fused together in a more or less perfect manner. Even the two eyes have been known to unite into a single eye, forming a cyclopean monster, as have the two ears, though naturally standing so far apart. As Geoffroy remarks, these facts illustrate in an admirable manner the normal fusion of various organs which during an early embryonic period ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... people of America. Only a few enthusiasts say that the civilised peoples of America, especially the Peruvians, are Aryan by race. Yet the remains of Peruvian palaces are often by no means dissimilar in style from the 'Pelasgic' and 'Cyclopean' buildings of gigantic stones which remain on such ancient Hellenic sites as Argos and Mycenae. The probability is that men living in similar social conditions, and using similar implements, have unconsciously and unintentionally arrived ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... there separate rocks, projecting like Druidic stones from the valley of gaping ravines; and beyond them all a higher mountain, among whose rocks and ilexes you doubtfully distinguish the walls and towers of the Etruscan city. A mass of Cyclopean wall and great black houses, grim with stone brackets and iron hooks and stanchions, all for defence and barricade, Volterra looks down into the deep valleys, like the vague heraldic animal, black and bristly, which peers from the high tower of the municipal palace. One wonders how this could ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... precisely because she can still feel that a motor is a different sort of thing from a meadow. By the accident of her economic imprisonment it is even possible that she may have seen more of the former than the latter. But this has not shaken her cyclopean sagacity as to which is the natural thing and which the artificial. If not for her, at least for humanity as a whole, there is little doubt about which is the more normally attainable. It is considerably cheaper ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... grove, a valley made a channel for sound that brought to our ears the thunder of guns, with firing so rapid that it was like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size of ship-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an open sweep of park-like country toward wooded hills. As far as we could see against the background of the foliage which threw ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... notable geological explorations of the southwest, he laid his course by a temple of rock "lifting its opalescent shoulders against the eastern sky." His party first sighted it across seventy miles of a desert which "rose in a series of Cyclopean steps." When, climbing these, they had seen the West Temple of the Virgin revealed in the glory of vermilion body and shining white dome, and had gazed between the glowing Gates of Little Zion into the gorgeous valley within, these scenery-sated veterans of the Grand ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... century, and the top, built by the Florentines, in the thirteenth, and sealed for their own by two fleur- de-lys, let into its masonry. The most important difference, marking the date, is in the sculpture of the heads which carry the archivolts. But the most palpable difference is in the Cyclopean simplicity of irregular bedding in the lower story; and the delicate bands of alternate serpentine and marble, which follow the horizontal or couchant ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... with its towers, its dimly-lit long stone corridors, cyclopean ivy-clad walls, narrow windows, and great panelled chambers, breathed an atmosphere of the long ago. So extensive was it that only one wing—that which looked far down the glen to the blue distant mountains—had been modernised; ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... and lose it within its vast depths and ramifications. Multitudinous lofty mesas, buttes, and pinnacles began to appear, each a mighty mountain in itself, but more or less overwhelmed by the greater grandeur of the Cyclopean environment. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... a pool was here rather deep, while at the back of it stood a collection of those curious and piled-up water-worn rocks that are often to be found in Africa. These rocks, lying one upon another like the stones of a Cyclopean wall, curved round the western side of the mound, so that practically it was only open for a narrow space, say thirty or forty feet, upon that face of it which looked on to ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... today to review the mass of archeological data which the discoveries of this civilization have produced. They consist of cyclopean ruins of cities and strongholds, tombs, vases, statues, votive bronzes, and exquisitely engraved gems and intaglios. That which is most valuable in establishing the claim of the African origin of the Grecian ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... members of the Gun Club warmly congratulated the engineer Murchison; his cyclopean work had been accomplished ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... camera process, that renders views taken by such means so deficient in air, or, as the artists term it, aerial perspective, most distant objects seeming almost as near as those in the foreground. This indeed is the main defect of all photographs: they are true representations of nature to one eye—cyclopean pictures, as it were—appearing perfectly stereoscopic with one eye closed, but seeming absolutely flattened when viewed by the two eyes. I remember being shown a huge photograph of the city of Berlin, taken from ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... looked with sad affection on this last glimpse of sea-girt England, and strained my eyes not too soon to lose sight of the castellated cliff, which rose to protect the land of heroism and beauty from the inroads of ocean, that, turbulent as I had lately seen it, required such cyclopean walls for its repulsion. A solitary sea-gull winged its flight over our heads, to seek its nest in a cleft of the precipice. Yes, thou shalt revisit the land of thy birth, I thought, as I looked invidiously on the airy ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... philosopher, who likened the world to a vast animal, is appearing each day as too real for poetry. The ocean lungs pulse a gigantic breath at every tide, her continental limbs vibrate with light and electricity, her Cyclopean fires burn within, and her atmosphere, ever giving, ever receiving, subserves the stupendous equilibrium, and betrays the universal motion. Motion is material life; from the molecular quiverings in the crystal diamond, to the light vibrations of a meridian ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for us, and surrounds our palace as with an impregnable fortification. Believe me, notwithstanding your now antique appearance—except at very close quarters, and without close examination (I don't think you have quite as many crow's-feet round your cyclopean eye as myself), it is not possible to distinguish you from me—believe me, in spite of this, the circle of charming darlings, reflecting that you are the heir to the greatest crown in the universe, will discover that you are even ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... considerable skill, and often with taste and feeling. The violin, however, is esteemed most highly, and its fortunate possessor cherishes it above wife or children, he keeps it with his white buckskin shoes, red sash, and only embroidered shirt, in the solitary trunk with cyclopean lock and antediluvian key, which goes so far, in Central American economy, to make up the scanty list of domestic furniture. The youngest of our hosts was the owner of one of these instruments, of European manufacture, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... it, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for the artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian. They make one feel to what a degree architecture is a primitive thing, by demonstrating (what is also demonstrated by the cyclopean vestiges, the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic Hindoo pagodas) that the greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... as we trudged through the sleeping town to the lava, two miles away. The brilliant moon gave us a superb view of the volcano, a gray-brown mass rising, expanding and curling in with a profile like a monstrous cyclopean face. But nothing in mythology gives a suggestion of the fascination of this awful force, presenting the sublime beauty above, but in its descent filled with the mysterious malignance of ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the Greeks both in northern Greece and in Peloponnesus, and spread over the coasts and islands of the Archipelago, was a people of whom they had an indistinct knowledge, whom they called Pelasgians. They were husbandmen or herdsmen. Their national sanctuary was at Dodona, in Epirus. The "Cyclopean" ruins, composed of huge polygonal blocks of stone, which they left behind in various places, are the remnant of their walls and fortifications. The Greeks looked back on these Pelasgian predecessors as different from themselves. Yet no reminiscences existed of any hostility towards them. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... other country. Is there not a picturesque side to the triumph of civilisation over barbarism? Is there nothing of the picturesque in the long thin lines of gleaming steel, thrown across the countless miles of desert sand and alkali plain, and in the mighty mass of metal with its glare of cyclopean eye and its banner of fire-illumined smoke, that bears the conquerors of stubborn nature from side to side of the great continent? Is there not an element of the picturesque in the struggles of the Western farmer? Can anything be finer in its way than a night view of Pittsburg—that "Hell with ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... not seeing the interior of the Pantheon. The gods are all gone, and the saints are gone or going, for the State has taken the Pantheon from the Church and is making it a national mausoleum. Victor Emmanuel the Great and Umberto the Kind already lie there; but otherwise the wide Cyclopean eye of the opening in the roof of the rotunda looks down upon a vacancy which even your own name, as written in the visitors' book, in the keeping of a solemn beadle, does not suffice to fill, and which the lingering side ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... my shoulder and made up my mind to start some other time on the cyclopean task I had ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... they all saw it, a single, pin-point glow, far back in the blackness, a Cyclopean eye, that swayed as it approached. Alternately it waned and brightened. Suddenly it illuminated the dim lineaments of a face. The face neared them. It joined itself to reality by a very solid pair of shoulders, and a man sauntered into the twilit mouth of the cavern, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... be called, were in such a fearful state that it took us ten days to cover as many miles. At length we trekked over a stony nek about five hundred yards in width. To the right of us was a stony eminence and to our left, its sheer brown cliffs of rock rising like the walls of some cyclopean fortress, the strange, abrupt mount of Isandhlwana, which reminded me of a huge lion crouching above the hill-encircled plain beyond. At the foot of this isolated mount, whereof the aspect somehow filled me with alarm, we camped on the night of ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... bury'd! greedy limbs "Fatten on limbs digested, and prolong'd "One's animation by another's death. "In vain the earth, benignant mother, gives "Her copious stores, if nought can thee delight, "Save with a savage tooth this living food "To chew, and Cyclopean feasts renew. "Can'st thou not cloy the appetite's keen rage, "Deprav'd desire! unless another die? "That early age, to which we give the name "Of golden, happy was in mellow fruits, "And plants, by earth produc'd; nor e'er did gore ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... of an elevated ridge which forms one side of the fertile and extensive valley in which Cuzco stands, built, like ancient Rome, on a number of hills or slight rises. To the north of the city, on the summit of a lofty eminence, appeared the still dark and frowning fortress of Cyclopean architecture, composed of stones of vast magnitude. When I afterwards visited it, I was surprised to find the extraordinary nicety with which, without any cement, they were joined together; and I cannot tell with what machinery the Peruvians could have raised blocks ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... lofty hill, Whose high embattled walls had often rolled The surging, angry tide of battle back. Walled on three sides, but on the north a cliff, At once the city's quarry and its guard, Cut out in galleries, with vaulted roofs[1] Upborne upon cyclopean columns vast, Chiseled with art, their capitals adorned With lions, elephants, and bulls, life size, Once dedicate to many monstrous gods Before the Aryan race as victors came, Then prisons, granaries and magazines, Now only known to bandits and wild beasts. ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... there; but it was hidden under the luxuriance of the overgrowth, hidden to casual passers-by like the life of insects. Only by the seaside, where the houses were clustered together above a seawall of cyclopean stones, and on the beach, where the long narrow boats, sharp-prowed and piratical, were drawn up to the shore, the same gnome-like little men, with a generous display of naked brown limbs, were sawing and hammering and ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... such multitudes and over such extents of ground as to suggest our own colossal swarms. Babylon and Memphis, Rome and Carthage, London and Paris, those frantic hives, occur to our mind if we can manage to forget comparative dimensions and see a Cyclopean pile in a pinch ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... still soft from the night's frost), my thoughts took the colour and breath of the place. They circled, as these paths circle round the hill, about those ancient Greek and old Italian cities, where the cyclopean walls, the carefully-terraced olives, followed the tracks made first by the shepherd's and the goat's foot, even as we see them now on the stony hills all round. What civilisations were those, thus sowed on the rock like the wild mint ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... nothing; Not even my own ignorance, as some Philosopher hath said. I am a schoolboy Who hath not learned his lesson, and who stands Ashamed and silent in the awful presence Of the great master of antiquity Who built these walls cyclopean. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... which compose their cylindrical dwellings—dwellings that, from their form and structure, seem suited to remind the antiquary of the round towers of Ireland, and, from the style of their masonry, of old Cyclopean walls. Even the mason-wasps and bees are greatly inferior workmen to these mason amphitrites. I was introduced also, in our ebb excursions, to the cuttle-fish and the sea-hare, and shown how the one, when pursued by an enemy, discharges a cloud of ink to conceal its retreat, and that the other ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... of the Sheds works, in her thousands, at her Cyclopean edifice, each has her own home, a sacred home where not one of the tumultuous swarm, except the proprietress, dreams of taking a mouthful of honey. It is as though there were a neighbourly understanding to respect the others' rights. Moreover, if some heedless one mistakes her cell ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... the flood subsided." Great bowlders, half hidden by the bracken, lie about in wildest confusion; the remains of what seem to be Druidic circles can be traced here and there, and it is hard to persuade one's self that the ragged towers and picturesque piles of rock are not the work of Cyclopean architects. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Nausicaa's time, the young man wishes to enter the dance with new-washed garments, white as snow, whose folds ripple around his body in harmony with his graceful movements. Many an echo of Phaeacia, in language, custom and costume, can be found in Greece at present, indicating, like the Cyclopean masonry, the solid and permanent substructure of Homer's poetry, still in place after more than 2500 years of ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... between was of a strange thick bluishness, almost like raw egg-white; while, as always here, some snow-clouds, white and woolly, floated in the pale sky. Down this avenue, which produced a mysterious impression of Cyclopean cathedrals and odd sequesteredness, I had not passed a mile, when I sighted a black ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel |
